Hazardous waste incinerators, and the web of regulations intended
to make them operate safely, have come under withering criticism
from government scientists, private researchers, and the WALL
STREET JOURNAL during the last 60 days. Officials of EPA (U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency) and private research scientists
now admit that hazardous waste incinerators emit hundreds of
times more dioxins and other toxic air pollutants than is allowed
by EPA regulations, and the JOURNAL revealed a record of
malfunctions, including explosions and major releases of toxins,
that incinerator operators have tried to cover up and that
regulatory officials seem powerless to understand, much less
curtail.

Scientists employed by U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)
admitted last month that modern hazardous waste incinerators
simply cannot comply with existing federal regulations because
they cannot destroy all chemicals with 99.99% destruction/removal
efficiency (DRE), which is the efficiency required by federal
law. Federal law further requires that certain wastes of "special
concern" such as dioxins, furans, and PCBs must be destroyed with
99.9999% DRE. EPA scientists said last month that they have known
since at least 1985 that hazardous waste incinerators could not
meet any of these regulatory requirements.

The story broke when Pat Costner, a chemist and research director
for Greenpeace, published an independent analysis of dioxin
emissions from the Jacksonville, Arkansas incinerator.[1] The
Jacksonville incinerator has begun burning 16.5 million pounds of
herbicides (2,4,5-T and 2,4-D) left over from the Vietnam war.
These wastes are known to be contaminated with total dioxins and
furans at concentrations ranging from to 3 to 40 parts per
million (ppm).

Costner's analysis revealed that the Jacksonville incinerator was
only achieving 99.96% destruction of the dioxins entering the
incinerator, thus emitting 400 times more dioxin into the
community than the law allows. An official with the Arkansas
Department of Pollution Control and Ecology (DPC&E) acknowledged
in telephone interviews that Costner's calculations are correct.
He also said the department had no intention of shutting down the
incinerator despite its continuing emissions of dioxin directly
into a residential community. He said the department did not know
what the total dioxin emissions into the population of
Jacksonville would be, but, he said, no matter what the total may
be, it is safe.

The Jacksonville incinerator is a key demonstration project,
established with the cooperation of EPA Administrator William
Reilly and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to show that
dioxin-containing wastes can be incinerated in a residential
neighborhood over the objections of the community.[2] In a
city-wide referendum in March, 1986, the people of Jacksonville
voted two-to-one (1383 to 656) to stop the project but government
officials simply ignored the vote and have overridden all
objections ever since. Costner's analysis clearly showed that
residents of Jacksonville are being exposed to levels of dioxin
contamination that exceed federal health and safety standards by
a wide margin. This is the first systematic dioxin experiment on
humans using a residential population. Previous dioxin exposures
of humans have occurred during industrial accidents and in the
industrial manufacture of chemical-biological warfare agents.
Dioxin is now known to cause cancer in humans and to disrupt
normal growth and development of fetuses and infants at low
levels of exposure.[3]

About 100 waste sites in the U.S. contain substantial quantities
of dioxin,[4] and the U.S. has stockpiles containing billions of
pounds of chemical-biological warfare (CBW) agents the government
has said it wants to incinerate. If the Jacksonville dioxin
experiment can be maintained despite ethical and public health
objections, government agencies will be able to claim they have a
green light to incinerate just about anything just about anywhere.

However the Jacksonville experiment has brought to light
information that could derail the entire U.S. incineration
program. In preparing her analysis of dioxin exposure of the
Jacksonville populace, Costner uncovered a government study
showing that tests in 1984-85 by private researchers, under
contract to EPA, revealed that hazardous waste incinerators
cannot be expected to achieve 99.9999 percent destruction of
wastes that occur in concentrations lower than 10,000 parts per
million, and cannot be expected to achieve 99.99 percent
destruction of wastes that occur in concentrations lower than
1000 ppm. EPA published the 1985 data in 1989.[5]

When this information came to light, a news reporter from the
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE, Sandy Davis, interviewed Bob Hall,
chief of the EPA's Combustion Research Branch in Research
Triangle, North Carolina, and he confirmed what the EPA report
had shown. "The fact is that you run into problems with your DRE
[destruction/removal efficiency] when a low concentration of
wastes is fed into the incinerator," Hall said. "Our data clearly
shows that," he said. Davis asked Hall why EPA hasn't changed
its regulations since it knows existing incinerators cannot
comply with the regulations. Hall said, "I don't know why that
hasn't been changed. It's a regulatory issue. I'm in
research."[6] Costner uncovered a second EPA report,[7]
published in 1984 but never widely circulated, showing that,
among eight major hazardous waste incinerators studied, none
could achieve 99.99% DRE. Sandy Davis interviewed the author of
that report, Drew Trenholm of the Midwest Research Institute in
Research Triangle, North Carolina, who said incinerators simply
cannot achieve the DRE required by federal law. "The trend is
very strong in the data that this is the case," Trenholm told
Davis.

At public hearings over the past decade, dozens of EPA officials
have stated for the record that incinerators can achieve the
legally-required DREs, in what appears to be a coverup of public
health information of astonishing proportions.

If this is true, then Chem Waste's ongoing record of accidents,
explosions, leaks, releases and coverups involving their
incinerators must mean that even the wealthiest companies that
have written down their best intentions on a piece of paper still
cannot operate hazardous waste incinerators in a fashion that any
reasonable person would call safe.